This year I had the opportunity to lead our predictions for big data. Unlike most predictions this time of year, we don’t just look ahead for the coming 12 months. The effects of innovation, changes in the market and impact on IT budgets are hard to recognize over such a short timeframe. That’s why our predictions often extend to 36 months. (We also do lookbacks to see if we were right or not, but that’s a topic for another blog post.)
What became clear during the process of selecting and refining predictions is the focus has changed. Technology is no longer the interesting part of big data. What’s interesting is how organizations deal with it. The hype is receding and big data is no longer viewed as a simple technology problem. Organizations have to focus on the building blocks of enterprise information management (EIM):
So far, only the most rudimentary elements of enabling infrastructure have been considered. This is not sustainable. One prediction from my colleague Roxane Edjlali is that 60% of big data projects will fail to make it into production either due to an inability to demonstrate value or because they cannot evolve into existing EIM processes.
This is only part of the story. Cultural or business model changes will be necessary to benefit from big data. And ethics must be a primary consideration as privacy concerns rise in importance.
Gartner clients can read the full report here: Predicts 2015: Big Data Challenges Move From Technology to the Organization. If you want to ensure your organization is on the right side of the analytical divide, join me and my Gartner colleagues at the Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit.
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1 Comment
Great post. All of the stuff that companies *need* to do in order to get value out of Big Data is the stuff they don’t *want* to do because it is difficult, expensive, time-consuming, etc. Big Data, in many minds, is a gigantic “easy” button. It’s really good to call out the 40% success rate of making it to production when the basics are ignored.